Wit And Charm Are Powerful Weapons In Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines 2

While I was playing Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines 2’s demo at E3 last week, I was feeling pretty smug about bluffing my way through a problem. Then, the developer holding the controller hit the wrong button, and a fight broke out regardless. Bloodlines 2 looks like it has a wonderful breadth of experiences to offer…

New Fan Mode Brings The Silliness Of Prop Hunt To Fortnite

Fortnite’s latest Creative mode, Prop Hunt, pits two teams of players against each other. One team disguises themselves as objects around the level, and the other team has to discover and eliminate them. It’s a little basic, but it’s fun. Originating in the sandbox physics game Garry’s Mod, and having shown up in other games…

Wiki Titles You Can Sing To The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Theme Is Good Twitter

In 2014, webcomic XKCD introduced readers to the joy of Wikipedia article titles that can be sung to the tune of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song. Now there’s a Twitter bot spitting out fresh examples on a regular basis, turning even the most horrible eight-syllable tragedies into delightful singalongs. The “Wiki Titles…

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey Developers Say Breaking Series Traditions Made For A Better Game

When I sat down with the makers of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey last week, I had to ask them about Alexios, Kassandra, and the state of the franchise’s playable modern-day sequences. I also had to ask them about the option to ride a flaming horse. The flaming horse is a very small part of the huge…

Someone Turned Mario Into A Battle Royale, And It’s The Best Thing

Battle royale is one of the most dominant gameplay forms of the last few years, and Tetris 99 showed that you could apply the battle royale concept to anything. Mario Royale turns the classic NES game into a 75-person death race that’s some of the most fun I’ve had all year. Mario Royale, which can…

Nintendo’s Mobile Game Dragalia Lost Has Finally Lost Me

From its launch in late September through mid-May, Nintendo’s mobile RPG Dragalia Lost was part of my daily routine. I only missed one daily login during the entire period, and that was because I was recovering from surgery. But, over the past couple of weeks, the game’s pull on me has faded, and my play…

What Happens When Your Kids Develop Their Own Gaming Taste

For a beautiful few years, you have near-complete control over what your child plays. You decide what’s allowed and when, what to play together, which gems from the past to share with an excited five-year-old. Then a little more time passes, and suddenly the situation is completely different. There comes a point where kids are…

Tokyo’s Halloween Crackdown Includes Plans For Banning Public Drinking [Update]

Last year, Halloween in Tokyo’s Shibuya descended into chaos. According to News 24, Shibuya is moving towards regulating the area’s Halloween celebrations by banning public drinking in the roads around the station as well as in public parks. [Update June 20 – 6:00 am: Shibuya has banned drinking on the streets during Halloween and New…

It’s Hard For Japan To Change Its Escalator Manners

One of my first memories of moving to Japan in 2001 was the surprise at seeing how everyone lined up on one side of the escalator, leaving an open path for people in a rush. How courteous, I thought. But now, there are campaigns to change the country’s long-standing escalator manners. The tradition is so…

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K-Pop Pick Of The Day: Zimzalabim

Red Velvet, who is quickly becoming one of my favorite artists of all time, just released their newest title track, Zimzalabim. And it’s… hmm. Part of the reason why I’m so struggling to encapsulate my feelings for Zimzalabim is, I think, because the song is quite literally all over the place. It kind of reminds…

League Of Legends‘ Version Of Auto Chess Has Taken Over Twitch

We have a habit, in the gaming industry, of declaring things “The Year Of ___.” 2013 was The Year Of Luigi. 2014 was The Year Of Luigi’s Death Stare. 2019 is The Year Of Gooigi. However, if Gooigi had not transformed into an unassailable, medium-defining phenomenon, we might also be tempted to call this The…

You Can Now Play Mass Effect 2 In First-Person

The Mass Effect games are third-person by design, but that hasn’t stopped LordEmil1 from creating a mod that lets PC gamers play the best of them—Mass Effect 2—from a first-person perspective. You can’t play the whole game like this, as combat isn’t working properly due to clipping issues, but everything else, from wandering to conversations,…

Fake Magic: The Gathering Card Names Are Fantastic

Jason Rohrer (Passage, Sleep Is Death) thought it’d be fun to train an AI to create fake Magic: The Gathering card names. It was a good hunch. To do it, he created a database of 18,978 card names, which the AI would then use to jumble all the words up and come up with new…

Fan-Made Half-Life 3 Is Coming Along Nicely

Last year, a group of Half-Life fans announced that they were going to be taking former Valve writer Marc Laidlaw’s Episode 3 synopsis and turning it into an actual game. A year later and things are looking good! The team behind Project Borealis have released this update video that shows all the work they’ve been…

EA: Our Loot Boxes Are Actually ‘Surprise Mechanics’ That Are ‘Quite Ethical’

Given that 2017’s Star Wars Battlefront II is broadly considered the tipping point in an anti-loot-box conversation that has recently led to a loot box bill in the United States senate, you might be forgiven for thinking that Electronics Arts games have loot boxes. Not so, says its VP of legal and government affairs; they…